Mysteries Unveiled

For thousands of years, the walls of a cave in north-eastern Spain held a secret that thousands of people would walk past without ever recognising it. Visitors explored its underground passages. Tourists admired its unusual rock formations. Some even scratched their names and dates into the walls, unaware that beneath and around their markings were images created by people who lived during the Ice Age. Then, in October 2019, an archaeologist noticed something unusual. What initially appeared to be another mark on the cave wall turned out to be part of an extraordinary collection of prehistoric engravings. Further investigation revealed hundreds of individual designs, including horses, deer, wild cattle, goats and an exceptionally rare representation of a bear. When the research was published in the journal Antiquity on 5 November 2026, it documented 280 prehistoric graphic motifs inside the Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, Spain. Fifty-five of these were identifiable animal...

What if one of history's most baffling books has been made even harder to understand by the way its pages were put together? The Voynich Manuscript has resisted generations of codebreakers, linguists and historians. Its pages contain unfamiliar writing, extraordinary botanical illustrations, circular astronomical diagrams and scenes that continue to puzzle researchers. Yet a new study published in the academic journal Digital Medievalist has proposed that part of the problem may be physical rather than linguistic: the manuscript's pages may not be arranged in their original order. The research, by medieval manuscript specialist Lisa Fagin Davis and information scientist Colin Layfield, examines an unusual possibility. Rather than originally being assembled as a conventional medieval book, the Voynich Manuscript may have consisted of individual folded sheets intended to be read in sequence. At some point, those sheets may have been incorrectly grouped and bound together. ...

Nearly 4,500 years ago, a vessel carrying ancient pottery crossed the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. Somewhere off the coast of what is now Türkiye, near Kekova Island, the voyage ended. The wooden ship has long since disappeared, but its surviving cargo is now helping archaeologists investigate one of the earliest known shipwrecks ever identified. The discovery is remarkable not simply because of its age, but because the objects recovered from the seabed may reveal how people moved goods between distant communities during the Early Bronze Age. The pottery offers clues about where the vessel came from, what it might have carried and how far ancient sailors travelled by sea. Yet important questions remain unanswered. The ship’s timber has not survived, the precise circumstances of its sinking are unknown, and scientists are still examining the evidence. So what has actually been discovered beneath the Mediterranean, and how confident can researchers be about its extraordinary ...

For centuries, a story passed down through Welsh literature has connected a powerful Roman emperor with the rugged hills of Pembrokeshire. The tale describes a military camp near Frenni Fawr, a landmark in the Preseli Hills of west Wales. Until recently, the connection between the story and the landscape rested largely on medieval tradition. Now, the discovery of a substantial Roman fort and two coins dating to the late fourth century has given archaeologists new evidence to investigate. The discovery does not prove that the emperor ever stood at the site. It does, however, raise a fascinating historical question: could a medieval Welsh legend preserve a memory of Roman military activity that took place in this part of Britain nearly 1,700 years ago? The fort was identified by archaeologist Dr Mark Merrony in 2024 after he noticed a convincing outline in satellite imagery. A subsequent visit revealed Roman building material, strengthening the initial interpretation. More recent arc...